26 July 2006 11:56 AM

Israel is the most important foreign policy issue of our time. It also divides opinion at home, in a way which is often slightly disturbing. Yet it is a matter where strong passions are generally matched by weak understanding and limited knowledge. I thought it would be worthwhile to post some thoughts about it which I hope will help understanding of the crisis.

It is one of those issues where conventional wisdom is almost overpoweringly strong. Among newspaper and TV commentators and presenters, the following view ( which is not mine, which is why I have enclosed it in quotation marks) is almost universal:

I summarise : "Israel needs to make concessions to the Palestinians if it wants to live in peace. These concessions should take the form of land. It may be that Israel was once a small country under siege from more populous neighbours, but Israel has now taken on the role of bully and aggressor, oppressing and abusing the Palestinian people. It will forfeit its right to the support of the West unless it changes this behaviour. The pre-1967 borders of Israel are the correct borders and a withdrawal to those borders would bring about peace. Israel is responsible for the squalor and misery of the Palestinian refugee camps, a wretchedness which naturally breeds terrorism and hatred. There is a 'cycle of violence' in the region which prevents reasonable discussion. "

I shall examine this view later. But beneath lies a series of other views, some justified, some ugly and wrong. The first of these is what I call 'Judophobia'. I use this word to distinguish it from the expression 'anti-semitism', and also to annoy people who have embraced political correctness and classify others as suffering from 'homophobia' or 'xenophobia'. For Judophobia, in the form of anti-Israel prejudice, is very common among PC types.

Accusations of anti-semitism bounce off these people. Everyone these days has seen 'Schindler's List' and everyone knows that he is not like those horrible, mad Nazis. We are grown-up, enlightened, civilised people who don't suffer from irrational bigotry of this kind. Of course we don't want to send Jews to extermination camps, so we're not anti-semitic.

Well, the dislike of Jews existed before the Nazis, and was quite respectable, often among intelligent people. It is in my view impossible to pretend that Shylock in 'The Merchant of Venice' or Fagin in 'Oliver Twist' are not classic anti-Jewish caricatures. Yet these were the work of great artists, and we do not disdain Dickens or Shakespeare because they suffered from this problem. Hilaire Belloc was actively hostile to Jews, yet we still read his poems and his 'Cautionary Tales' (at least one of which has an anti-Jewish undercurrent) are still read by children. Roald Dahl is also thought by some critics to have had a deep dislike of Jews, which appears in a thinly-disguised form in 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' .

There are even anti-Jewish caricatures in one of the Tintin books, 'The Shooting Star', written in Belgium under Nazi occupation and later altered to remove blatant anti-Jewish references. And let's not even mention Wagner.

Unpleasant or prejudiced references to Jews are to be found in John Buchan's thrillers and some of Somerset Maugham' s novels. Some people think Graham Greene's 'Stamboul Train' is anti-Jewish too. Before Hitler came along, this attitude was quite respectable and open. Nowadays, I think it still exists but is much more discreet. And a newspaper journalist whom I like, and whose work I admire, once suddenly confided to me that he 'just didn't like Jewish people'. I'm sure he was and is as disgusted by Auschwitz as anyone else, and doesn't connect his view with the Nazis at all. In some people this view, though seldom if ever expressed, is very deep. There are also some people who are totally irrational about this, and with whom it is quite impossible to argue. The phobia against Jews is a very strange thing, very old, deep and mysterious.

Then, in a certain British generation, there is a special bitterness on this subject. Veterans of the final years of the British Mandate in Palestine (1945-47) experienced the disgusting terrorist acts of the The Stern gang (or Lehi as it called itself) and the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the murders of Lord Moyne and of Count Bernadotte, the murders of British soldiers, the atrocious bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people died, and body parts of the victims were plastered horrifically all over the YMCA building opposite.

This unforgiveable and inexcusable behaviour left those who experienced it - in many cases - permanently and understandably hostile towards Zionism and Israel, and perhaps Jews as a whole. Winston Churchill, a long-time convinced Zionist, was himself badly shaken in his view by the killing of his friend, Lord Moyne. This divide will remain for as long as the State of Israel fails to condemn these actions and the men who perpetrated them, who in many cases became successful political leaders later in life.

Not really comparable with this reasoned mistrust is the nasty form of Judophobia now prevalent across the Middle East - the circulating of anti-Jewish rubbish such as the long-discredited 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion', as if it were fact, the description of Jews as the offspring of pigs and monkeys, in parts of the Arabic press. For more details of this sort of thing, you can to http://www.memri.org which provides English translations of it. You may find it hard to believe that this sort of thing still goes on, but it does, and it is increasing.

This is much more like the poisonous, diseased propaganda of the German National Socialists.

And it is, in a strange way, linked to them.

For another element in all this is a rather disgraceful attempt by both Europeans and Arabs to argue that the moral debt to Jews, owed by the world because of the German massacre of Europe's Jews, and our failure to take them in or save them, has either been paid in full already or cancelled out by later events. Some also argue that this debt is simply not owed by the Arabs who played no part in this slaughter.

But this is not entirely so. The main leader of the anti-Jewish movement in the British Mandate of Palestine before World War Two was a man called Haj Amin al Husseini (Also known as Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, see the Wikipedia reference to him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amin_al-Husayni This man was so opposed to Jewish migration to the area that he eventually threw in his lot with the Nazis (who are now suspected of having sought to foment Arab opposition to Jewish migration in the late 1930s). This of course made it far harder for Jews to get out of Germany when Hitler began his anti-Jewish measures. Al Husseini eventually went to live in Berlin and recruited Muslims to the Waffen SS. He also lobbied against the emigration of Jews from Nazi-controlled areas of Europe to Palestine. It is not known whether he realised what would happen to them if they stayed under Nazi rule. But he must have known it would not be good.

I mention this for several reasons. One, British colonial officials - who disapproved of the policy of creating a National Home for the Jews chose Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and therefore local Arab leader. They did this despite the fact that the Arabs of Jerusalem preferred other candidates for the job.

These officials, notably Ronald Storrs, thought the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain supported a 'National Home for the Jews' in Palestine, was a mistake. They wanted a wholly pro-Arab British policy. They and their allies spent the inter-war years trying to sabotage the 'National Home' idea and by 1939, when they achieved an almost total block on Jewish immigration there, they had pretty much succeeded. It was only the revelation of what Hitler had done to the Jews of Europe that reopened the issue in 1945.

Two, much of the propaganda against Israel dishonestly and falsely seeks to compare Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to Nazi treatment of the Jews. There is no comparison. And Palestinian spokesmen often ask " Yes, the Jews did suffer in the Holocaust, but why should the Arabs have to play such a part in compensating them?' .This is a partial answer to that.

Three, the late Yasser Arafat is said to have identified Al Husseini as his hero. And finally, Husseini originally believed that the area called 'Palestine' by the British empire (which had for centuries before been a series of unconnected provinces in the Turkish empire) should form part of a 'Greater Syria' . Actually this is almost certainly what would happen if Israel ceased to exist as a Jewish state. Husseini only later adopted the 'Palestinian' nationalism which has been such a brilliant propaganda ploy, turning Israel from David into Goliath. Set against the whole Arab world, Israel looks tiny. Set only against the Palestinian Arabs, it looks huge.

But let's go back to the issue. Alan Dershowitz, in his interesting book 'The Case for Israel', points out that Israel has done many bad things and has many faults, and deeply deserves to be criticised. But he goes on to say that these criticisms need to be kept in proportion. Yes, Israel drove many Arabs from their homes in 1948 and should be criticised for this. But no more - and no less - than the Poles and Czechs and Russians should be criticised for driving millions of German civilians from their homes after 1945; and no more - and no less - than India and Pakistan should be criticised for the horrible expulsions and massacres of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs at partition in 1947. Turkey's treatment of the Armenians in 1915, and the 'exchange of population' between Greece and Turkey after World War One were also appalling. Come to that huge numbers of Jews were cruelly expelled from Arab lands in the years after Israel was founded.

No doubt there are other episodes of this kind, several in British imperial history. If every displaced group of people on the planet had the right to demand its return home, the entire globe would be at war from New South Wales to North Dakota. But it is Israel's which is remembered longest and still kept alive as a military and diplomatic issue, and it is Israel which is subject to more condemnation than any other nation by the UN.

No doubt much of this condemnation is justified, but is it really in proportion? Arab countries oppress and kill their own people, and make war on one another. Christian Arabs face growing persecution from their Muslim neighbours. Syria's President Hafez al Assad destroyed the entire Syrian city of Hama with artillery fire (with the people in it) because they supported the Muslim Brotherhood. Gaza was under illegal Egyptian rule for 20 years and nobody cared about its cramped squalor. The West Bank of the Jordan was illegally occupied by Jordan for nearly 20 years and nobody protested about that either. Sometimes it seems as if the only people who get criticised for being cruel to Arabs, or for occupying Arab land, are Israelis.

If one person or country is condemned for doing something, while another person or country is not condemned for doing the same thing, we have to ask why. And isn't it possible that the explanation is that there is some sort of prejudice in operation? I only ask.

But of course most people don't form their opinions in this way. They pick them up, as they pick up other fashions, from what they hear around them, from the prejudices of the media, which become their prejudices by a subtle process. These, by the way, don't take the form of the BBC correspondent saying "Israel wickedly bombed civilian targets last night". You only catch it on the edge of a remark. The reporters themselves often don't know they are doing it. It is their unconscious choice of verbs and nouns, their tone of voice, the selection of pictures and the attitudes to spokesmen that you have to watch.

For instance, Palestinian and Arab spokesmen tend to be interviewed respectfully and courteously, whereas Israelis are often interrogated fiercely and aggressively (Watch out for this. I'm interested to see if any readers noticed a flagrant example of this on a well-known news programme recently).

Well, if this bias is based on racial prejudice, which I rather suspect it is, then it should stop right now. And if it is designed to appease Muslim hostility to Jews (which I am afraid to say exists, encouraged by some passages in Muslim scripture, and which - unlike Christian Judophobia - is not adequately disowned and denounced by the leaders of the religion) then that is just as bad.

And in that case, the issue is really quite simple. The Western world, under British leadership, agreed after World War One to set up a National Home for the Jews in the Middle East. After World War Two, the whole world, under American and Soviet leadership, agreed in 1948 to the existence of a Jewish State. In the years between these two events, one of the most civilised nations in the world, Germany, actually made the case for such a state, by launching the systematic, industrial massacre of Jews wherever it could get its hands on them.

Remember, just eight years before this massacre began, Germany had been a law-governed democracy, one of the most liberal in the world. France, whose authorities enthusiastically collaborated with the German round-up of Jews, had - only a year before - been a beacon of democracy, liberty and tolerance. For those who think it couldn't happen in Britain, it's worth remembering that Jews in the British Channel Islands were registered and had their identity papers stamped with a large red 'J' . Jewish businesses were forced to display yellow 'Jewish undertaking' signs, Jews were secretly denounced to the authorities, newspapers were required to publish anti-Jewish articles and cinemas to show anti-semitic films. At least one Guernsey Jew was driven mad by persecution, and another hounded to his suicide. Jews from the islands were also, I'm afraid, deported to the death camps, with the co-operation of the local police.

And this, by the way, was not a religious but a racial persecution (I mention this because people sometimes ask me 'Why should there be a special country for people who follow a particular religion?'). Jews who wanted to assimilate in Christian countries were killed as surely as those who did not. Edith Stein, a German Roman Catholic nun, was dragged from her convent to be murdered at Auschwitz - because she had Jewish grandparents. Babies and young children were included in the massacre.

During the preparations for this massacre, the other nations of the world often refused to accept Jewish refugees. When news of the massacre reached the British Foreign Office during the war, an official dismissed it as the complaint of 'wailing Jews'. And nothing was done.

With that in mind, it would be dishonourable and wrong to go back on our pledges. Nobody has yet thought of a better way of avoiding a repetition of the crimes of the 1940s. In any case, weakness and vacillation lead inevitably to defeat. And if we abandon Israel it will not just be a betrayal of our own honour but also an invitation to the West's many enemies to demand more concessions.

As for the conventional wisdom of the commentators, let me take it piece by piece: "Israel needs to make concessions to the Palestinians if it wants to live in peace. These concessions should take the form of land."

**There is no evidence that territorial concessions will bring peace. Far smaller Jewish states were proposed by the Peel Commission in 1937, and by the UN in 1947, but rejected by the Arabs. Palestinian voters recently voted for Hamas, a party which does not accept that Israel has a right to exist. They knew what they were doing.

" It may be that Israel was once a small country under siege from more populous neighbours, but Israel has now taken on the role of bully and aggressor, oppressing and abusing the Palestinian people."

**Israel remains a tiny country and it continues to face the hostility of the entire Muslim and Arab world, including oil-rich Saudi Arabia, nuclear-armed Pakistan, Iran and - despite a very cold peace treaty - Egypt. Yes, Israel is subsidised and armed by the USA, but so, to very similar levels, is Egypt. The 'Palestinian' cause certainly has some justice. The displaced refugees from 1948 ought long ago to have been resettled and compensated. But there must be a suspicion that the oil-rich Arab world - which could have achieved this easily - prefers to keep them where they are for propaganda purposes.

"Israel will forfeit its right to the support of the West unless it changes this behaviour."

**The West is entitled to criticise Israel when it does wrong things ( though Britain's participation in the Iraq war makes it hard for us to take a moral stand on the killing of civilians). But the facts are that Israel was created on our promise, and that it is by world standards a free, law-governed country which tries to abide by civilised standards. To compare Israel to Nazi Germany, or to cast it as the bully in the region, is plain false.

"The pre-1967 borders of Israel are the correct borders and a withdrawal to those borders would bring about peace. "

**Arab propagandists now say they like the 1967 borders. But they did not like them before 1967. In pre-1967 times they harked back to the 1947 borders, which were even more cramped. Actually, Israel long ago returned most of the land it conquered in 1967, in return for peace with Egypt. But while that peace is very cold and not guaranteed to last, the land is gone for good. Land for peace? That's what they said about the Munich agreement for which Neville Chamberlain is rightly reviled. Land was certainly handed over. But there was no peace.

Israel is responsible for the squalor and misery of the Palestinian refugee camps, a wretchedness which naturally breeds terrorism and hatred.

**See above. Israel is certainly to blame for its cruel expulsions in 1948. But much has happened since. That responsibility is not Israel's alone. The Arab world should constantly be asked why it does so little to help the refugees, who seem to have plenty of access to weapons, but not so much to clean water, electricity and good-quality housing."

Bad as the living conditions are in the camps, these are no excuse for terrorist murder. There is never any excuse for terrorist murder, and we in the West should be careful not to offer one. The idea that bad conditions equal desperation equals terrorist murder is a wicked falsehood, which assumes that poor and oppressed people lack consciences and can therefore be excused if they adopt criminal methods.

This is, in a way, a slander on poor Arabs - who in my experience are hospitable and generous people and who have on many occasions in recent history courageously protected Jewish neighbours from murderous attacks. I am quite sure most Arabs would not dream of using such methods and privately condemn them, though there is little free speech on this subject in the Arab Muslim world. And, as it happens, a large number of those involved in terrorist actions come from prosperous and well-educated families.

There is a 'cycle of violence' in the region which prevents reasonable discussion."

**This is simply a way of saying 'six of one and half a dozen of the other'. But Israel has from the start been willing to compromise over territory. In their speeches to their own supporters, leaders of the Palestinian movement have repeatedly made clear that any settlement would be a stage on the way to final victory, the end of the Jewish state which remains their aim. That aim remains a realistic one, as long as the West offers concessions in return for violence. It will only be abandoned if the West shows unflinching resolve to stand by its promise. And then - as should have been done long ago - the plight of the refugees can at last be addressed.

13 July 2006 10:12 AM

A small point about the extradition, without proper evidence, of the 'Natwest Three' to the USA. The law which allows this was pushed through, far too quickly, on the grounds that it would fight terrorism. Yet here it is being used in a case which has nothing whatever to do with terrorism.

The same will be true of all the other attacks on liberty being made in the name of the 'War Against Terror'. That is why they should be rejected. they make us no safer, and they make us much less free.

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I will not let go of this. Anthony Blair and his latest Defence Secretary Des Browne should not be allowed to forget that they ordered British troops into Afghanistan for political reasons, that they have no military or political case for being there, that they have once again sent brave men into battle with inadequate equipment and the British lives which will undoubtedly be lost will be on their consciences. The increase in troops just announced will simply increase the number of targets for the Taleban without making success any more likely. How will we know when we have succeeded anyway? No proper objectives for this mission have been provided.

A contributor last week chided me for my lack of geo-political knowledge, saying that perhaps there were good reasons for our Afghan deployment. He said "Perhaps he (me) might start by asking himself why a wish by Great Britain to maintain a close relationship with the United States is necessarily "sucking up" to the Americans. Could there possibly be some weightier reason than is captured in this schoolboy language? Could there not be larger forces at work, larger matters at stake, in that region of vital strategic importance than Mr. Hitchens wants or is able to see? Is it all too far away for him to expend the effort?"

Not at all, though it seems to me that those who send and command soldiers have more need to make the effort to explain what lies behind their decision than do those who oppose the deployment. And the point I made was that in a lame Commons performance the junior minister who bothered to turn up could not meet demands for such an explanation from one of the few MPs who is in fact an experienced soldier.

As for geopolitics, I am more or less certain that my grasp of the subject is better than the Prime Minister's, whose knowledge and understanding of history and geography are notoriously feeble. If there are 'larger matters at stake', what exactly are they? Those who would risk the lives of other men's fathers, brothers and sons seem to me to have a duty to say, rather than just looking serious and mysterious and expecting us to believe (against all available evidence) that they secretly know what they are doing.

I have dealt elsewhere with the ridiculous fantasy that Afghanistan is some kind of world headquarters of jihadist terrorism. Anyone with any knowledge of this terrorism knows that it is many-headed and has many different sources, usually operating quite independently in the countries where it is to be found. And much of its ideological support comes from within countries which are officially our friends and which we are certainly not going to invade, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

One of its most potent bases is of course in Iraq, where our ill-judged intervention (which failed some time ago and whose withdrawal is merely a matter of time) provided opportunities for several different fanatical factions to gain far more influence than they had before.

And those who have cheerfully accepted our recent co-operation and alliances with sordid, brutal and barbaric warlords in Afghanistan will have to explain to me how this differs morally from the time when we supported and supplied Saddam Hussein. This is presumably a policy they must by implication now disown, since they cite his barbarity as the main reason for overthrowing him.

Clever geopolitical experts also need to explain this to me: in Iraq we intervened to depose Saddam, whose repression crushed the very Islamists we claim to be fighting. Thanks to our intervention, previously emancipated Iraqi women must now go about veiled, and must cower at home for fear of violent attacks by fanatics similar to the Taleban.

Yet we allege we have intervened in Afghanistan to crush the Islamist fanatics who force women to go about in veils and cower at home.

Geopolitical experts can perhaps show me (in schoolboy language if necessary) why British and American soldiers are risking their lives in different Muslim countries with diametrically opposite results, or at least purposes. And before going on about the supposed blessings of 'democracy' which they have brought, they might also tell me how long they would expect the artificial and largely imaginary 'democracies' in either country to survive once they ceased to be propped up by American bayonets.

As for the primacy of the Anglo-American alliance, I would like to ask just how much harm it would do to our relationship if Britain occasionally said 'no' to the USA. Harold Wilson quite rightly declined to get involved in the Vietnam war, and we seem to have remained friends. If I were an American I wouldn't respect or trust an ally who always did as he was told. There will be life after this President, and it will not necessarily do us much good with his successor to appear to have been in George W.Bush's pocket.

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12 July 2006 11:25 AM

How frustrating it is to be right all the time. Ten years ago I was warning that Anthony Blair was an empty vessel and that New Labour were a threat to this country. At the time, many conservative-minded people had decided to swallow New Labour propaganda, or at least to go along with it, and I was almost wholly alone in the world of commentators. I remember a student debate in the spring of 1997 when I tried, against howls of decision, to point out that sleaze affected all governments after a while, and wasn't in itself a reason to vote Labour. Obvious, eh? Yet people - who now join in the chorus of derision against Labour sleaze - simply wouldn't listen.

I remember a dinner on the top-floor of a once-great conservative newspaper, in which we were urged by a leading Tory intellectual to accept New Labour not because it was any good but because it was the coming thing and we might as well fall in with the fashion. I was almost physically sick.

For years I continued the near-solitary struggle against this tide of drivel. I remember one Labour conference, when every other paper was praising Mr Blair's ghastly speech as a work of brilliance, while I dared to point out the truth, that it was a mountain range of tripe. The BBC were so shocked that the 'Today' programme actually quoted my words, in tones of shock and disapproval.

Now, of course, all those who sided with Mr Blair in those days, and praised his windy orations, will tell you that they knew all along he was a fraud. Let me tell you that this is not true. I was there. They were taken in, mainly because they wished to be. New Labour banked and cashed every word of support they spoke, and benefited from their betrayals. Only a couple of other commentators, I think, can claim to have held out against him from the start. Perhaps it was only one.

Then along came the Iraq war. I had already attacked Mr Blair's Kosovo expedition (a view that made me quite unpopular with people who generally liked what I wrote) and I thought the two were more or less the same - faked up pretexts for interventions which were not in British interests and which threatened the whole idea of national independence.

As for 'weapons of mass destruction' it seemed blindingly obvious to me that this was a false alarm. The purported evidence was feeble and questionable. In fact, it seemed to me that those who shouted loudest about the supposed Saddam Hussein threat did not even take their own propaganda seriously. It was baby-talk, designed for idiots. Yet large numbers of apparently intelligent journalists and commentators took it seriously. Once again, it was because they wanted to.

You might have thought there was some satisfaction in having got these (and other) things right. For instance, I think the world is now waking up to the folly of sex education, the dangers of identity cards (liberal commentators are now attacking this idea as if they'd just discovered it, whereas I've been warning against it for years). The idea that it's better to be married than unmarried when you have children is, I believe, about to become accepted wisdom again. Even Christianity is making a bit of a comeback, and people are less ashamed to admit to it. The intelligent Left are coming round to supporting grammar schools (just as the useless Tories definitively declare that they are against them). The horrible 'Good Friday' agreement with the IRA, much praised at the time by everyone except me, now has many critics. My warnings about crime are generally seen to have been right, and those who scornfully dismissed the idea that foot patrols were useful have, I think, been defeated. The hysterical dismissal of migration doubts as 'racism' has failed. We even beat off the attempt to abolish the Pound. And I will admit that there is a sort of grim pleasure to be swimming against the tide

But the problem is that, in practice, most of it has so far been futile. Just as the political and media world wakes to the wretchedness, stupidity and anti-British nature of New Labour, it swallows another fraud - the Cameron Tory Party. I could wallpaper my house with the indignant letters I receive from Tory loyalists who ask "Why don't you attack Labour?". Have they really not noticed that I have spent the last ten years doing so, without let-up?

I didn't attack Labour because they were Labour. I attacked them because they were anti-British, pro-EU, pro-crime, anti-education, pro-immigration, anti-marriage, pro-political correctness. And Mr Cameron's Tory Party is now almost exactly the same. Only two sets of people, the Polly Toynbee leftists of the Guardian, and the embattled Tory tribalists, actually believe that Mr Cameron is concealing in his heart a set of conservative policies, which he will spring on us if he is elected.

On the contrary, I think Mr Cameron's 'All You Need is Love' nonsense about hoodies is his true opinion. This is the sort of soppy thing that guilty rich people actually think, because they are embarrassed by their unearned wealth, and don't grasp that it is the poor who are the main victims of crime and disorder. Other Tories have thought this sort of tosh in private for years, as can be seen from their record in office. But Mr Cameron is the first to believe that it might help him to own up to it in public.I think he will find he is mistaken about that.

And so what are we offered? A chance to fire one New Labour government, and then elect another one exactly the same?

No thanks. We have to tell these people that they've misgoverned our country for long enough and we don't want them any more. I'm told my 'none of the above' campaign is futile and bound to fail. Yet it seems to me that it is close to success. the Bromley by-election result was, unusually for such events, incredibly significant. The voters turned their backs on the government and the opposition. I've never seen such a thing before. A bit more of this and the main parties will no longer be able to claim any sort of mandate and they will start to crumble. It is closer than we think, and we could bring it about if we try.

And then? Well then it will be up to us to create parties that do speak for us, and which are prepared to discuss the actual issues in our lives. If we don't then, there will have been no point in being right.

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06 July 2006 12:19 PM

The Newbury Bypass - remember Swampy and the other protestors clinging to doomed trees? - has already far surpassed the traffic levels it was expected to carry. In a few years it will be jammed and motionless for much of the time. There will be calls for it to be widened and for the A34 (of which it forms a part) to become a full-scale officially-acknowledged motorway. Then a few years later it will jam up again. And so on, until what?

The government will agree to expansion after expansion of the roads. More beautiful countryside will be chewed to bits by bulldozers, and the great swathe of noise and fumes which blights the surroundings of such highways will grow a little bigger.

It is all quite predictable. Yet until the 1960s a railway line ran along the Newbury bypass route, a line that - at a fraction of the cost of the Newbury Bypass - could have been widened and electrified to provide a fast direct rail freight route from Southampton to the North. It served this purpose during World War Two, the last time it was properly used.

Had this happened, much environmental damage, lost land, noise and filthy exhaust clouds, would have been avoided. Instead, the line was closed and its melancholy traces can be found scattered over bits of Southern England, like Roman remains. It could never be built again. It would be too expensive and impossible to assemble the land.

Similarly, the one British mainline railway line equipped to carry wagons and carriages of continental loading gauge (the rails are the same distance apart, but on the Continent, as observant travellers will have noticed, tunnels and bridges are wider, and signals and other obstacles placed further from the track, allowing much bigger vehicles) was ripped up in the 1960s.

One day, we will recognise our amazing stupidity in chucking away the great railway legacy which the Victorians and Edwardians left to us.

Railways were first developed in this country because they are so perfectly suited to our tight-packed ancient landscape. Yet even the spacious, generally car-obsessed USA, which has all but destroyed its once-wonderful passenger trains, has had the sense to keep the tracks open for goods. Vast, mile-long trains run ceaselessly along lines long ago barred to passengers, taking millions of truck loads off the Interstate Highways, making life safer, quieter, more efficient and cheaper for America.

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I should have thought it was quite hard to tread on a man's groin by accident, but then I was brought up in the old-fashioned belief that a gentleman never unintentionally put his boot into someone else's crotch. Those were the days.

English football seems to have been brought down by its own nasty nature, just as much as by the fact that actually we're not very good at the game any more. And quite right too. The defeat was richly deserved. One of our great national problems is that we just won't look our national decline in the face, and this refusal to acknowledge reality is specially common amongst football fans.

They seem to care nothing about our loss of national independence, the decline of education, morals and legality, so long as 'England', or 'Britain' - a team of footballers (soccer or rugger) or cricketers - scores well in some meaningless tournament.

Now I think it is obvious that our national decay has now affected our sporting teams as well. To anyone not affected with the quasi-religious fervour of the fan, it has been clear for years that our national teams simply aren't up to the standards of the rest of the world. The idea that football was 'coming home', or that 2006 would see a repeat of 1966 was obviously silly.

Does this have anything to do with our sliding, collapsing civilisation? I should think it does. Real sporting success comes from self-discipline, from the recognition and encouragement of talent especially among the poor, from courage and determination, and an ability to learn from defeat rather than blame others for it.

These are among the qualities we have lost and destroyed as we have trashed our schools, our morals, our family life and our real patriotism. So, if you really want to see English or British teams winning world tournaments again, you will have to start caring about the things that really matter, instead of distracting yourself by doomed dreams of glory on the field of play.

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05 July 2006 9:57 AM

Now, before we are in too deep, the British public must make it clear that it has had enough of Anthony Blair's vain military adventures and especially that we simply ought not to be in Afghanistan.

A government that is not really in control of its own streets, which cannot prevent terror attacks here and which refuses to spend enough on defence, has no business sending brave British soldiers to Afghanistan. It clearly has no real idea of what they are doing there or when, if ever, they can be brought home. There is a simple answer to this. They should be brought home now, rather than suffering severe casualties for no purpose, while ministers dither.

If the USA thinks that Western troops are needed in this place, then it must provide them itself, or find another country willing to provide them. No British interests are served by having our soldiers there - the simple test to which all such deployments should be subject.

As to what NATO is doing in this part of the world, I cannot begin to explain it. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was formed to defend Western Europe against the Soviet menace and should have been wound up at the successful conclusion of its mission in 1990. If somebody wants to create a World Army or International Brigade, then they should say that is what they are doing and explain to us what its aims are and what laws govern its use. Quietly to convert NATO from an anti-Soviet alliance into such a world army is dishonest and bound to lead to confusion.

As we saw on Monday, the government has thought so little about this - and cares so little about it - that the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, could not get even himself to the House of Commons in time to answer an urgent question on the subject, a question that was lodged early in the day and which was entirely predictable given the weekend's increasingly bad news from Helmand Province.

In the absence of Mr Browne, a junior understrapper, Tom Watson, was sent over the top. One feels for these untrained, ill-equipped fellows, thrust into the battle in this way.

But Mr Watson was lucky. The Useless Tories were, as usual, quite feeble. They are uneasy - as well they might be- about the shocking casualty rate and the obvious lack of equipment. But they simply will not break with the consensus and question the government's fundamentally bogus justification for the whole business. They are not prepared to oppose - which is why they should be sacked from their job as official opposition.

Only one Tory, the serious former soldier Andrew Robathan, got the government's range. There are quite a lot of such MPs now trapped in the Tory Party, who would be mightily effective if only they were freed from the ghastly Cameroon embrace.

He asked a deadly question:" Soldiers understand that it is absolutely essential that one has a clarity of mission, which all energies are devoted to fulfilling, yet the Minister has spoken about narcotics, the economy, the Government and all sorts of things. What exactly, succinctly and clearly, is the mission that our soldiers are pursuing, and to which their energies should be devoted?"

The minister couldn't, or wouldn't answer this. That's because the truthful response is that British troops are in Afghanistan, as they are in Iraq, because the government believes that our relations with the USA will be closer and friendlier if we suck up to the Americans. Pretexts are then invented to suit whatever audience is listening.

Actually, I think this toadying to Washington is sadly mistaken. Nobody respects a pushover. The USA does not treat us specially well in return for our subservience. During my two years in Washington I never discovered an American who had heard of the supposed 'special relationship'. while our own diplomats were at pains to avoid the expression.

Look at the disgracefully one-sided extradition treaty between our two countries, and at several recent trade disputes, not to mention the American pressure to surrender to the IRA.

The official version - that destroying the poppy harvest offers a lasting and workable solution to the heroin problem, that a few hundred troops, most of whom don't speak a word of the local language, can help bring about the rebuilding of a country devastated by a third of a century of war, that the hardened fighting men of the Parachute Regiment are there to win 'hearts and minds' - is an insult to the intelligence.

They remind me strongly of the naive drivel, swallowed by far too many broadcasters and journalists, about our presence in Basra after the Iraqi invasion. This was repeatedly described as a 'success'. Our troops, it was claimed, patrolled without helmets and body armour, fostering good relations with the locals.

This was, as it turned out, mostly propaganda piffle. To begin with, before the Iraqis realised that they were now living in an anarchic state, there was some truth in it. But once the Shia militias took control of the region, it rapidly ceased to be true. And in other parts of the British occupation zone, it became a rather sick joke. British forces in Iraq now spend most of their time defending themselves. They do not control anything outside their bases, where the militias and the Ayatollahs rule.

Things are already much the same in Afghanistan, where our soldiers are mainly involved in defending each other against attacks from a resurgent Taliban, who they acknowledge - with the practical honesty typical of soldiers - as skilled and deadly fighters with advanced tactics and much combat experience, plus close knowledge of the terrain.

It's my view that if Afghans want to be governed by Islamic obscurantists rather than by corrupt, savage warlords, that is their choice, much as it is in Somalia. I do not believe that we could ever impose any other government on them by force. And I am highly dubious about the belief that Jihadist terrorism would be much restrained if we did manage to turn Afghanistan into a law-governed democracy. Not that this is likely. Militant Islam is an ideology with many bases of operation and is not a tight-knit network controlled by a single sinister bogeyman from a cave in the Himalayas.

I have always been puzzled by the supposed rule that one does not criticise military deployments once the soldiers are in combat. Obviously if we were in a total war for national survival, then such a rule would make sense. But we're not. All the wars in which British troops now find themselves are wars actively sought by this government, not wars forced on us by aggressive foes threatening our well-being or independence,

The Taliban will not be helped or encouraged by honest criticism here of British policy. My admiration for the soldiers themselves is total. I have been, as briefly as I could manage, into one or two war zones and in some very hot and humid countries, and as a result I have some idea of what they are enduring, month after month. It is astonishing that they put up with it.

I also argue that the deaths and casualties they suffer have nobility and purpose in spite of the futility of the government's own actions. Soldiers uphold the highest human virtue, that of courage, which makes all the other virtues possible. They also uphold the great traditions of their regiments, and of the Army as a whole, which are among the great pillars of our civilisation and the ultimate guarantee of our national independence.

I don't think my attacks on the government will demoralise these fine men. On the contrary, I think we owe it to them - because they are a disciplined service and cannot talk openly about these things - to speak on their behalf when their qualities and discipline are being abused.